On nearly the one-year anniversary of this video’s creation, I’m finally posting it. This video was made feverishly in a single night, as an experiment with highly edited gameplay content. It was preceded by my Battlefield 4 LP… succeeded by my Dark Souls 3 video… and concurrent with this video on my second channel, which came from the same Pro Lucio gaming sessions.
But I never posted it, because I wanted to keep it as a backup video if I ever had a slow month. I did have plenty of slow months over the past 12… but it never felt like the right time. So here it is after a year!
Interesting note:
I used Ask DNA because I was playing that song on loop the entire night we recorded that Overwatch footage.
Oh my god. If you’re reading this, I did it; against all odds. Strap in for the long haul…
It all began in April 2015, while JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders was still finishing up its second season. I had the horrible idea to make a Cowboy Bebop OP parody like so many others before me. I was working in Sony Vegas Pro, which is suicide for a project of this nature.
This was the first thing I made. It’s been my channel avatar since the day I started the channel (22 July 2015), as a constant reminder that this project is technically older than the channel itself.
Similarly, this has always been my channel header:
I started off making simple backgrounds and static shots in Adobe Fireworks, because I hadn’t learned Photoshop at the time. It’s probably for the best that I kept it simple and static, because as soon as I added moving parts, this early version of the project fell apart.
Pictured above: An early draft of the endslate, later to be replaced.
Pictured below: What replaced it.
It was also during this period in the project’s lifespan that I wrote all the text that I would be sprinkling throughout the video. I transliterated the lyrics of all 4 of the JoJo opening themes, then purposefully worsened the translations in order to mimic the goofy english text in the Cowboy Bebop OP
Phantom Blood:
JOJO
JOJO JOJO
Two
twin stars, in falling from the heavens, are swallowed by a surface
of both light and darkness. Their
ripples move outward, pulled toward each other. The
sun will guide those men who walk the path of honor, demanding a
sacrifice from all who pursue their ambition.
JOJO
JOJO JOJO JOJO JOJO
With
pounding hearts and burning will, with thundering fists and
overflowing bravery… These
men bravely step forward, free of doubt. For
it is this fate to which that blood is condemned.
Battle Tendency
From
the silent depths, awaken the ‘Pillars’, beyond their time. Crimson
blood now summons the valorous to stand up. That
love, which must be inherited, is known as ‘fate’. Forward,
steps are now taken, with smiling eyes. Mystifying
the darkness, dodging in mere blinks, slipping through their blades,
and finding an opening to strike. Conviction
tested opens the way to the future.
LIKE
A BLOODY STORM. HOT
LIKE A BLOODY STONE.
Destiny
is written into that man’s veins. The
undying bonds of honor arise. They
will be taken hold of.
Stardust Crusaders OP #1
And
now these gathering stardusts, summoned in the awakening of a century
old catastrophe. All
these brave men must face now a race beyond the sands of time with
this journey. Entangling
all like a chain, karma intertwines them. With
one’s fate shrouded by the platinum.
STAND
UP, STAND UP, STAND UP. Shooting
across, and beyond.
ALL
RIGHT NOW, ALL RIGHT NOW, ALL RIGHT NOW. It’s
a vigorous bullet.
JOJO
JOJO JOJO
BREAK
YOU DOWN, BREAK YOU DOWN, BREAK YOU DOWN.
And
those fists will fly free. With
this hallowed vision, STAND PROUD.
Stardust Crusaders OP #2
A
tale, long left asleep at the deep sea. Heat
now rises… from rippling sand. The
call of destiny… echoes once again. A
glowering inferno scorches their destination. The
power of the gods has been assembled. Pierced
by a blade that knows no fear. Where
they are headed lies a fate yet unknown. But
their final battle swift approaches.
But
the one who will type that period is… STAR PLATINUM.
Their
story has begun. Their time is running out. They
will finish this. They won’t stop. CRUSADERS. He’ll
take the blank last page and plant his fist through it.
END
OF THE WORLD! That blood’s memories.
オラオラオラオラッ!
オラオラオラオラッ!
オラオラオラオラッ!
オラッ!
Here’s the earliest existing clip of the video, rendered from the .veg file on 12 April 2015. Created by meticulously keyframing 4 copies of the same yellow line. Notice that it’s in 16:9 instead of 4:3, because I didn’t know enough about aspect ratios to realize that would be a problem.
Later on, I had to frankenstein these black bars onto the edges of the video to approximate 4:3. …It didn’t work.
Here’s an early version of the Joestar Family Secret Technique, which I tried to rotoscope from this crappy video. Jesus christ nigeru da yo.
“OH NOOO! This version of the project will never work out!” -Me, June 2015
Long story short, I worked on and off for a few months, but eventually Sony Vegas killed the project, and I realized I would have to start from scratch in another program. Which would mean rebuilding a lot of assets from scratch. Which put me off the project for a long time. In the meantime, I’d thoroughly learned my way around Vegas, and had started making other, simpler videos, where I didn’t have to make my own assets.
But early 2015 passed into late 2015. Late 2015 passed into early 2016. And slowly 2016 began to come to a close. In October I started to feel the itch to get back into making content. I pumped out an hour-long Battlefield 4 LP just to warm up, but I really felt like I needed some motivation.
Would you believe that Steven Universe is what did it? I watched the left over episodes from the Summer of Steven, and inspiration hit me like a truck. I started delving into behind the scenes stuff from the creators of the show, and found this series. I didn’t actually do the 4-week program Ms. Sugar describes, but the kick in the pants was all I needed. There was also a great quote from an AMA, where she said: “Rest of life? Outside of my work? What is that??? I love working. I love working so much. I feel awful when I’m not
working.” …I decided to roll with that motto.
So yeah, Rebecca Sugar is pretty much the central reason I produced so much content in November and December this year. I made about
4 mashups, 31 tumblr posts,
and 12 videos, not including JoJo’s Bebop Adventure, which took hundreds of hours by itself. Much of this time was spent listening to this playlist. You can call that cheesy, or nay-say Steven Universe all you want, but without it JoJo’s Bebop Adventure probably wouldn’t have happened.
But back to JoJo.
On 7 Nov 2016, I created the final Adobe After Effects file that the finished product would be rendered from. My primary source of inspiration in this fresh start was EvaBebop. (Go figure that I would take inspiration from Evangelion of all places). In some ways, I consider JoJo’s Bebop Adventure to be a cosmic successor to EvaBebop, linked across time and space by common tastes. You’ll notice that the two videos even use the same font for the credits, despite being made ten years apart.
Now’s as good a time as any to talk about the credits. I had to combine a lot of different sources, which was frustrating because I felt like I couldn’t be 100% confident in my accuracy. It doesn’t help that David Production made the official credits list on their website a jpg that I couldn’t easily translate!
Anyway, here’s the credits as I arranged them:
Planned
by LUCKY LAND COMMUNICATIONS
Original
Story Hirohiko Araki
Manga
Published in Shonen Jump/Ultra Jump
Character
Design Masahiko Komino
A
Production of Tokyo MX,
MBS
Assistant
Directors Jiro Fujimoto, Toshiyuki
Kato
Animation
Director Kentaro Tokia
Key
Animation Eiji Komatsu
Series
Composition Yasuko Kobayashi
Script Shinichi
Inotsume
Music
Composed by Yugo Kanno, Taku
Iwasaki, Hayato
Matsuo
While we’re on the subject of David Production, I just want to take a moment to express what a bunch of hacks they are. This might not be a controversial or revolutionary statement, but the JoJo anime has horrendous animation. Why actually animate anything when you can move the camera to make it seem like you animated it? I rewatched so many episodes of Stardust Crusaders with a fine-tooth comb looking for a good clean full-body shot of a stand appearing next to someone. There aren’t any! I ended up having to use more shots from the JoJo OPs than the actual show, because they’re superbly animated.
So for anyone wondering why there’s a disproportionate amount of Joseph in this video, it’s because Battle Tendency just had more usable footage. Plus, JoJo parts 2 and 3 both fit the tone of Cowboy Bebop better than parts 1 and 4.
And now that we’ve established ALLL THAT, let’s talk shop. If you’ve stuck around this far, you get some real behind the scenes.
I basically had to learn all of After Effects in the span of 2 months in order to complete this project by the end of the year. Once I got into the groove, my workflow went a bit like this…
Pick a shot from the Cowboy Bebop OP.
Open a new Pre-comp in After Effects for just that shot.
Export a single frame of the shot into Photoshop:
Break it down into a transparent foreground:
And a colored background:
Now bring these new assets back into the Pre-comp in After Effects, and fill the shot with appropriate footage from JoJo. Again, possibly the most difficult part was finding appropriate footage.
Let’s take this shot for example:
Here, I had to first create the foreground and background assets.
Then, I skimmed through several episodes of Stardust Crusaders looking for footage of someone running around, until I found a good clip of Joseph in Episode 12, when he has the Empress stuck to his arm.
Then I went frame by frame through the whole clip, rotoscoping Joseph by hand.
Then, I had to color correct him to look cel-shaded. This took me ages to figure out. To get it to look right, you have to use the ‘Change to Color’ effect (Effect>Color Correction>Change to Color).
First pick a very common color in the shot (i.e. Joseph’s yellowish shirt color, as seen in the above image). Then change it to be the same color as the background. Important: Select ‘Hue and Saturation’ from the drop-down menu, and crank the ‘Tolerance>Hue’ to 100%. The rest of the Tolerance settings can stay at their default of 50%. This will make it look okay, but we’re not done.
Next step, pick a dark dark tone (i.e. Joseph’s wristbands as seen in the image above), and use ‘Change to Color’ to change everything of that color to pitch black. This time, select ‘Hue, Lightness, and Saturation’ from the drop-down menu instead of just ‘Hue and Saturation’, and set the ‘Tolerance>Hue’ and ‘Tolerance> Lightness’ settings low, around 5%. You will have to manually adjust this, because every image is a bit different. You should now have something that looks terrible, like the image below. But it serves to bring out the shadows in the piece, which will help with the cel-shading.
Finally, select a light tone (i.e. Joseph’s shoulders as seen in the image above), and use ‘Change to Color’ to change everything light in the image to the same color as the background. Again select ‘Hue, Lightness, and Saturation’ from the drop-down menu, and experiment with the ‘Tolerance>Hue’ and ‘Tolerance>Lightness’ settings until you get the cel-shaded look depicted below.
What you’ve essentially done is changed all the shadows to a single block of black, and all the light parts to the color of the background. It looks great!
Now you have to stick everything else in the shot, like the text.
Above: Every single layer marked with red is a piece of text in the background behind Joseph.
And that was my workflow for almost every shot in the video.Arduous, slow, and probably more labor-intensive than it needed to be.
I don’t know if I’ll ever make something like this again. I’m too much of a perfectionist for a project where the focus is on creating new assets instead of editing together pre-existing ones. It just doesn’t play to my strengths.
I’m very very proud of how it turned out, but another project of this nature would have to be significantly scaled back, or at least make use of subject matter with better animation.
